ALUMNAE/I
BOOKS

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The Surrealist Look: An Erotics of Encounter, Mary Ann Caws ’54, MIT Press, 1997. A melting wristwatch. A man in a bowler hat flying through the air. Images such as these became the signatures of surrealism, an art form that trod a finer-than-usual line between avant-garde and hype. Its most famous practitioners were men — Man Ray, Salvador
Dali, René Magritte, and André Breton — who often depicted women as little more than body parts. Caws examines the misogyny that ran rampant t
hrough surrealism. She suggests that surrealism is descended from the Baroque, another style of art that rejoiced in exaggeration.

Shakespeare’s Monarchies: Ruler and Subject in the Romances, Constance Jordan ’57, Cornell University Press, 1997. The author examines how Shakespeare, through his romances, contributed to the cultural debates over the nature of monarchy in Jacobean England. Stressing the difference between absolutist and constitutionalist principles of ru
le, Jordan reveals Shakespeare’s investment in the idea that a head of state should be responsive to law, and not be governed by his unbridled w
ill. Drawing on representations of servitude and slavery in the humanist and political literature of the period, the author shows that Shakespeare’s abusive rulers suffer as much as they impose on their subjects.

Through the Looking Glass: Women and Borderline Personality Disorder, Dana Becker ’69, M.S.S. ’82, Ph.D. ’91, Westview Press, 1997. The author explores the relationship between gender, the experience of psychological distress currently called “borderline personality,” and its diagnosis as a classification of psychiatric disorder. The anal
ysis emphasizes elements of female socialization as critical to understanding the development of symptoms.

Making a Necessity of Virtue: Aristotle and Kant on Virtue, Nancy Sherman ’73, Cambridge University Press, 1997. Recent moral philosophy has seen a revival of interest in the concept of virtue in the work of Aristotle and Kant. Sherman argues that Kant preserves a notion of virtue in his moral theory that bears recognizable traces of the
Aristotelian and Stoic traditions, and that his complex anthropology of morals brings him into surprising alliance with Aristotle.

Believing Identity: Pentecostalism and the Mediation of Jamaican Ethnicity and Gender in England, Nicole Rodriguez Toulis ’85, Berg Publishers, 1997. The author argues that religion cannot be understood simply as a means of spiritual compensation for the economically disadvantaged Jamaican migrants in Britain. Rather, in the New Testament Church of God, the cosmology of the church resolves the questi
ons surrounding identity as well as suffering. Religious participation is one way
in which African-Caribbean people negotiate the terms of representation and interaction in British society.

Studies in Honor of Brunilde Sismondo Ridgway, edited by Kim J. Hartswick, Ph.D. ’84, and Mary C. Sturgeon, Ph.D. ’71, The University of Pennsylvania Museum. The essays in this volume were written by 26 of the students whose doctoral dissertations were directed by Brunilde Sismondo Ridgway,
Ph.D. ’58.